Tag Archives: Energy

Because it seems likely that there is money to be made by reducing fossil fuel use, and energy use in general, there is currently an intense amount of entrepreneurial activity surrounding all aspects of our energy supply and usage. This book is an attempt to make some sense of the overwhelming amount of information about this activity streaming down the web (and in the scientific and engineering journals). It is a result of three months in early 2015 of combing through entrepreneurial websites, news items in the press, and a variety of other sources (all well documented in the book) to see what new and exciting developments are occurring in energy.

The result is a fascinating look at the types of changes in our energy mix in the near future through over 250 vignettes of innovative energy projects, many in their earliest stages, organized by type of energy activity being considered. Sections of the book include energy efficiency, energy storage, improving the grid, novel energy applications, photovoltaics, solar thermal, hydro/tidal/wave energy, wind, geothermal, nuclear, vehicles, biofuels and synfuels, hydrogen, hydraulic fracturing, carbon sequestration, energy governance, and energy finance and economics. $19.95 at Amazon.com

In 2011 Mike Hulme published an opinion piece, Meet the Humanities, in Nature Climate Change, one of the premier scientific journals dealing with climate change. He asserted that “Although climate is inarguably changing society, social practices are also impacting on the climate. Nature and culture are deeply entangled, and researchers must examine how each is shaping the other. But they are largely failing to do so” (Hulme 2011)*. This was likely the first time that many climate scientists had thought much about the humanities as relevant to what they were studying.

This book sets out to rectify that, documenting what a broad selection of academics, journalists, artists, and others working in the humanities and social sciences have been writing about climate change recently. It consists of over 200 summaries of such works and provides a good introduction to the range of thinking about climate change addressed by non-scientists, and a good entry point to a growing literature. $19.95 at Amazon.com

Our newest book, published on May 6, 2015 and available at Amazon.com for $19.95.

The focus of this book is the interactions between energy, ecology, and climate change, as well as a few of the responses of humanity to these interactions. It is not a textbook, but a series of chapters discussing subtopics in which the authors were interested and wished to write about. The basic material is cutting-edge science; technical journal articles published within the last year, selected for their relevance and interest. Each author selected eight or so technical papers representing his or her view of the most interesting current research in the field, and wrote summaries of them in a journalistic style that is free of scientific jargon and understandable by lay readers. This is the sort of science writing that you might encounter in the New York Times, but concentrated in a way intended to give as broad an overview of the chapter topics as possible. None of this research will appear in textbooks for a few years, so there are not many ways that readers without access to a university library can get access to this information.

This book is intended be browsed—choose a chapter topic you like and read the individual sections in any order; each is intended to be largely stand-alone. Reading all of them will give you considerable insight into what climate scientists concerned with energy, ecology, and human effects are up to, and the challenges they face in understanding one of the most disruptive—if not very rapid—event in human history; anthropogenic climate change. The Table of Contents follows: Continue reading →